US funders lead $6.9m Seed round for AI drug pioneer Ignota Labs
The funding will be used to expand the pipeline by acquiring additional distressed assets and for advancement into early-stage clinical trials of the company’s first asset, a PDE9A inhibitor.
Drug safety failures are a leading cause of clinical trial failures, preventing over 56 per cent of drugs from reaching patients and costing the pharmaceutical industry more than $400 billion annually.
Ignota Labs addresses this issue by applying deep learning, cheminformatics, and bioinformatics to uncover and resolve the root causes of drug toxicity – unlocking new opportunities for assets that would otherwise be abandoned.
“We’re thrilled to have the support of this leading investor syndicate in our mission to rescue promising yet struggling drugs with our technology,” said Sam Windsor, CEO and Co-Founder, Ignota Labs.
“Traditional safety assessments reveal when something is wrong, but our platform goes a step further by identifying the exact molecular and biological issues to provide actionable insights to re-engineer and revive therapies. With this funding, we can expand our efforts to salvage distressed assets and accelerate the delivery of life-saving therapies to patients.”
Todd Kimmel, Founder and Managing Partner of Montage Ventures, whose HQ is in Menlo Park, California, added: “Ignota Labs is solving one of the most critical challenges in drug development, rescuing promising therapies that would otherwise be abandoned due to safety issues.
“Its SAFEPATH platform represents a groundbreaking approach, combining cutting-edge AI with deep scientific expertise to address the root causes of drug toxicity. We believe Ignota Labs has the ability to enable more drugs to make it to the clinic and get to the patients who need them.”
Krish Ramadurai, Partner at AIX Ventures which is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, said: “Ignota is redefining drug development and pioneering a new era of predictive and engineerable biology – where AI systematically de-risks therapeutic development by designing safer, more effective drugs with precision.
“Its approach shifts biopharmaceutical R & D from trial-and-error to a rational, data-driven process, enabling molecules to be precisely refined at scale to accelerate clinical development.
“I’m incredibly excited about the company’s potential to transform AI-driven drug discovery and unlock massive value from previously failed assets to improve patient outcomes.”
Ignota Labs identifies promising drug candidates that have been abandoned due to safety concerns – typically 80-90 per cent of the way to success – and uses SAFEPATH to determine the underlying issues and develop solutions. This model not only reduces development timelines by years and costs by millions, but also offers multi-billion-dollar potential for each recovered therapy.
In just two years, Ignota Labs has demonstrated the power of its approach. The company successfully in-licensed its first asset, a first-in-class metabolic health drug with the potential to improve the lives of over 1.2 billion post-menopausal women.
Using SAFEPATH®, Ignota Labs resolved safety concerns that halted the drug’s progress, validating its findings through rodent models.
Ignota Labs was founded by a multidisciplinary team with expertise across machine learning, drug discovery, development and commercialisation.
CEO & Co-Founder Sam Windsor previously worked on DeepMind’s AlphaFold team and has a decade of experience in life sciences. Chief Scientific Officer Jordan Lane has advanced five assets to clinical development and Chief Data Science Officer Layla Hosseini-Gerami is an expert on AI and cheminformatics.
